Third World Quarterly

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Skills, training and development: an introduction

to the social life of skills in the global South

Trent Brown & Geert De Neve

To cite this article: Trent Brown & Geert De Neve (2024) Skills, training and development: an
introduction to the social life of skills in the global South, Third World Quarterly, 45:4, 607-623,
DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2023.2219615

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Third World Quarterly
2024, VOL. 45, NO. 4, 607–623
https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2219615

INTRODUCTION

Skills, training and development: an introduction to the

social life of skills in the global South
Trent Browna and Geert De Neveb
a
Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; bSchool of Global Studies, The University of Sussex,
Brighton, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

‘Skills’ and ‘skill development’ feature evermore prominently in inter- Received 21 April 2023
national development discourse and in the policies of governments Accepted 22 May 2023
across the global South. Yet, these discourses and policies often pro- KEYWORDS
ceed with a weak conception of the social circumstances and everyday Skill development
processes by which skills are acquired, disseminated, and used. This inequality
tends to result in approaches to skill development that are simultane- political economy
ously unrealistic, in the sense that they overlook the multiple social and employment
institutional impediments to remunerative or empowering forms of identity
skill utilisation, and overly restrictive in the sense that they fail to con- agency
sider the multiple ways in which skills are valued and deployed by indi-
viduals and communities. By drawing attention to what Carswell and
De Neve term ‘the social life of skills,’ contributions to this collection
expand conceptions of skills and skill development, particularly in rela-
tion to four key themes: (1) the social and political construction of cer-
tain forms of work as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled’; (2) the social processes of
skilling in formal, informal and non-formal settings; (3) the political
economy of skills and skill development, including their imbrication in
forms of exploitation and intersecting inequalities; and (4) the role of
skills in the expression of aspirations, identity and agency.

Over the last two decades, ‘skills’ have taken a central position in international development
discourse. If, throughout the twentieth century, one could fairly say that skills and vocational
education and training (VET) had been neglected in favour of a focus on primary-level edu-
cation within international development organisations (Palmer 2007), this appears no longer
the case. Skills have a central place in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). VET
is mentioned explicitly under SDG4, and this comes in the wake of around a decade of dia-
logue within UN organisations – particularly UNESCO – on how to make VET more inclusive
and conducive to more dignified work (McGrath and Powell 2016). In 2002, UNESCO formed
a subdivision, UNESCO-UNEVOC, which aggregates knowledge on VET policies and practices,
and produces a regular stream of publications highlighting the importance of VET in the
promotion of sustainable development.1 While the OECD’s policy advocacy around skills
was historically orientated towards the global North, since the Global Financial Crisis of
2008-9, it has increasingly focussed on low- and middle-income countries, promoting skill
development as a pathway to economic growth (Valiente 2014). The World Bank has similarly

CONTACT Trent Brown [email protected]

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2023 Global South Ltd
608 T. BROWN AND G. DE NEVE

advised that intermediate level ‘skills gaps’ constitute obstacles to economic growth in the
global South and advocated upgrading VET systems (McGrath 2010; Mori and Stroud 2021).
Such perspectives have been amplified since 2020, as international development organisa-
tions, including the International Labour Organisation, have attached hopes to ‘skills-led
recoveries’ following the economic disruption caused by Covid-19 (ILO and International
Labour Organisation 2021).
In tandem with, and in some cases predating, this focus on skills within transnational
institutions, have been a series of investments in skill development by governments across
the global South. China has a large system of vocational schools, in operation since the 1970s
(Woronov 2016). East and South-East Asia, Southern and Western Africa, and parts of Latin
America saw significant policy focus on vocational training in the 1990s and early 2000s
(Ashton et al. 2005; Palmer 2007; Powell and McGrath 2019; Zancajo and Valiente 2019).
Since 2007, India has set particularly ambitious targets for expanding its skill development
sector – initially aiming to train some 400 million workers across different sectors of the
economy in just over a decade (King 2012). The expressed rationales for these skill policies
are diverse, and tend to include macro-economic objectives, such as seising a ‘demographic
dividend’ and improving employment rates (Mehrotra 2014; Nambiar 2013), as well as social
objectives of addressing inequalities and socio-economic exclusion (Zancajo and Valiente
2019). Compelling structural factors behind the present skills drive include competitive
pressures between countries to capture higher-value sections of global supply chains
(Ashton et al. 2005), and achieving higher labour productivity, thereby positioning countries
as attractive destinations for global capital (Mehrotra 2014).
While not wishing to downplay the potential of high-functioning skill development sys-
tems to transform economies and individual lives, critics have noted that much of the thrust
towards skills in contemporary development policy rests on flawed assumptions. There is a
tendency to over-estimate the power of skill development to address problems of social
marginalisation, labour market exclusion and chronic un(der)employment and, in the pro-
cess, to neglect other structural factors at play, including the failures of neoliberal develop-
ment itself (Allais 2012; Adely et al. 2021). Moreover, the assumed causal links between
training and development are often simplistic, failing to recognise the complex relationships
between training programmes and the specific economic and social worlds in which they
operate. As Osterman et al. (2022) show, there is no straightforward relationship between
one’s capacity to perform complex job-related tasks on the one hand, and remunerative
employment and dignified work on the other. Crucially, training initiatives may serve not
only as sites of empowerment but also, in some cases, as sites where inequalities and exclu-
sions are reproduced, as several of the contributions to this issue reveal (McGrath 2010).
Several studies have highlighted the limitations of skill development programmes exclu-
sively aimed at enhancing productivity and employability (often informed by ‘human capital’
theories of educational development), especially in contexts marked by high levels of infor-
mality and jobless growth (Allais 2012, 2022; Anderson, 2009; Wheelahan, Moodie, and
Doughney 2022). As Saraf (2016: 16) points out, much of the rationale for strengthening VET
in India, for example, centres on growing the productivity of the informal economy by pro-
viding it with enhanced skillsets. However, a narrow and instrumentalist focus on productivity
not only risks reducing the aims of VET to the whims of market needs but also producing
serious disappointment among trainees when newly acquired skills are not matched with
subsequent employment, let alone more decent and rewarding forms of work (see Upadhya
 Third World Quarterly 609

and RoyChowdhury, 2024). Existing forms of exclusion and inequality can even be intensified,
such as when trainees from already disadvantaged backgrounds are provided with forms
of skills training that do not have the capacity to lift them out of informal work or enhance
their job and earning potential within informal labour markets (Brown 2023). Or, as Saraf
(2016: 17) put it, much skills training is for work that is low in the employment hierarchy and
will ensure trainees ‘remain employed in informal blue-collar work where working conditions
are severe, unstable and unequal.’ What, then, is happening when policies end up providing
marginalised and less educated trainees with low wage earning skills for labour markets
marked by informality and jobless growth?
Enhanced attention needs to be paid to the social processes and political economy in
which skills are embedded, and to how such processes shape the outcomes and impacts of
skill development initiatives. This collection, therefore, zooms in on ‘the social life of skills,’
defined by Carswell and De Neve as ‘the social processes, relationships, and ideologies that
enable (or constrain) people’s access to skills, and subsequently to employment, wages,
satisfaction, and dignity’ (2018: 313). Such a perspective requires a serious engagement with
questions of power, inequality and exclusion in the acquisition, deployment, and remuner-
ation of skills, as well as in the meanings and values ascribed to skills within specific cultural,
community and family settings.
In investigating the ‘social life of skills’ this collection makes four main contributions to
the above debate. First, it explores questions related to the social construction of skill – how
socially and institutionally accepted notions of ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ work, tasks, and persons
are shaped by prevailing structures of power, ideology, and value-making. Second, it uncov-
ers the social processes of skill acquisition through formal, informal, and non-formal learning,
and reveals the structural factors and intersecting inequalities that place constraints on
learning outcomes. In identifying these constraints, it may be possible to develop alternative
approaches to skill development that are more inclusive, cognisant of local social needs and
contexts, and orientated towards positive social transformation. Third, by showing how dif-
ferent skill development initiatives operate in practice, the contributions uncover some of
the broader political and economic forces that drive it, and the role they play in reproducing
inequalities at different scales. The empirically grounded papers reveal how skill develop-
ment may contribute to maintaining wage and job hierarchies within labour markets, repro-
duce the international division of labour, and bolster the demand for cheap labour. Fourth,
by focussing on how skill development initiatives are implemented and received by trainees,
various contributions explore how trainees creatively appropriate skills towards their own
goals of empowerment, identity construction and meaning-making – even where this was
clearly not the programme’s intended aim (Prentice 2015).

The social construction of skills

All work involves skills of some description – whether specialised or ‘generic,’ recognised or
ignored, remunerated, or devalued. Skills are understood variously as a kind of ‘capital’ mobil-
ised for completing complex tasks, as embodied and routinised performances, as an outcome
of social processes and political struggles, and as a form of agency and tool of resistance
(Attewell 1990). There are longstanding debates in the social sciences about how work comes
to be classified as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled.’ While the introduction of Taylor’s scientific manage-
ment no doubt led to considerable de-skilling under capitalist production (Braverman 1974),
610 T. BROWN AND G. DE NEVE

it is also clear that the degrading and undervaluing of labour can take place without actual
de-skilling (Blum et al. 2000). This is especially the case in work contexts where a multitude
of competencies and expertise are required, but not recognised as ‘skills’ (Heslop and Jeffery
2020). In such contexts, whose – and which – competences are socially and institutionally
recognised as ‘skilled,’‘highly skilled’, or ‘unskilled’ is an outcome of social, cultural, and polit-
ical processes that are always embedded in projects of social distinction, value making
and power.
Gowlland’s (2024) contribution develops this by exploring the meanings attached to skills
within indigenous communities in Taiwan. He shows how the term pulima is used within
these communities to describe someone ‘good with their hands,’ talented in multiple tasks,
and capable of getting things done. Being recognised as pulima is a way of gaining social
status. Yet, as Gowlland shows, the significance of the term is shifting with changing cir-
cumstances – increasingly recognised as pulima are those capable of drawing on traditional
skills for success in the market economy. It has also become a tangible symbol of indigenous
resilience in the face of settler colonialism. Gil’s (2024) ethnography on repair training for
self-employed entrepreneurs in Sao Paulo, Brazil, similarly unpacks what makes for ‘skill’
among mobile phone technicians who signed up for repair courses in a private school. The
training they received combined technical skills and standardisation with para-technical
guidance around speed, improvisation, aesthetics, and networking, which were equally vital
to successful repair entrepreneurship. While the school’s construction of skill attracted new
actors into repair and provided a training avenue for those without access to formal appren-
ticeships, it also excluded others along the lines of race, class, and gender.
This points to how the social construction of ‘skill’ must also be situated within struggles
over power, inequality and inclusion. Power structures, labour market dynamics, and nor-
mative values operating at various scales – shaped by the intersections of class, gender, race
and other axes of social difference – all influence how skills are valued and remunerated. As
Richardson and Bissell (2019) outline, there is a ‘macropolitical’ aspect to this: struggles
between states, institutions, capital and organised labour define and reshape discursive
categories of skilled/unskilled work, with implications for how that work is remunerated (see
also Pitt 2021). Yet, this also plays out at the ‘micropolitical’ level: ideas about what makes
for skill and how it is rewarded are constructed and reinforced at the level of the household,
in shopfloor politics, and through wider cultural and religious discourses, many of which are
explicitly or implicitly gendered, racialised and/or caste-ised. These processes often result
in the association of specific categories of work with women, ethnic groups, or marginalised
communities, and in the labelling of their work as ‘unskilled,’ irrespective of what technical
aptitudes their tasks actually involve (Osterman et al. 2022).
Rajendra’s (2024) contribution on waste workers in central India develops these themes
by documenting both the multiple skills involved in waste selection work and the processes
by which these skills are rendered invisible. Waste work remains perceived and categorised
as ‘unskilled’ in India, due to a range of social, political and institutional processes. Socially,
the nature of the work is stigmatised and falls on marginalised workers, particularly low-caste
women migrants, for whom opportunities to acquire more socially valued skills are often
unavailable or blocked. Politically, waste skills are possessed by weakly unionised contract
workers, whose livelihoods are at constant risk of displacement, and who have limited bar-
gaining power to demand greater recognition from employers or the state. Institutionally,
waste workers are formally classified by multiple government agencies and bureaucracies
 Third World Quarterly 611

as ‘unskilled,’ with direct implications for their remuneration and treatment. Crucially, the
social construction of waste workers as ‘unskilled’ is so entrenched that frequently they
themselves do not recognise the skills involved in their work, seeing it as just ‘nothing.’ To
capture the diversity of skills in waste work, Rajendra moves beyond interviews to focus on
the everyday – gendered – social practices that involve processes of learning and acquiring
skills, and on the institutions that mediate such ‘situated learning’ while bureaucratically
classifying such work as ‘unskilled’.
Notions of skilled and unskilled work are highly gendered. This was illustrated by Sen
(1999) in her study of women workers in the Bengal jute industry. While women and children
were gradually expelled from the jute mills in the late colonial period, those who remained
employed were ‘marginalised through being ascribed unskilled status and paid lower wages’
(Sen 1999: 101). Crucially, wages rarely reflected real skills and the jobs described as skilled
were not necessarily the ones that required the most training or capabilities. Rather skill
definitions themselves were ‘saturated with social biases’ and one of the most obvious of
these was a ‘gendered understanding of skill’ (Sen 1999: 105). Some jobs were designated
as skilled, not because they required specific competences or training, but because they
were done by men and were better remunerated. Other jobs were designated as unskilled
by the mere fact that women and children did them. Sen (1999: 105) concluded that ‘not
only was skill not an objective economic fact, it was an ideological category imposed on
certain kinds of work by virtue of gender and the power of the workers who performed these
tasks.’ By mere virtue of their gender, women’s work became known as unskilled and as light
and easy, which in turn justified lower wages. In other contexts, it is ethnicity, religion,
regional identity or migrant status that – in one combination or the other – shape the way
in which work is labelled and valued. Transnational and domestic migration regimes, for
example, often reinforce categories of ‘skilled’ versus ‘unskilled’ work, with the latter rou-
tinely being associated with migrants. Indeed, it is well known that employers and labour
markets across sectors draw on ethnicity, caste or regional identity to create ‘unskilled’ work
categories and justify the low wages and poor-working conditions of the migrant or minority
workers involved in them (Friberg and Midtbøen 2018; Heslop and Jeffery 2020; Pitt, 2021;
Iskander 2021).
Contributions to this volume similarly show how informal learning within patriarchal
contexts often results in women’s work being perceived as ‘unskilled.’ In the South Indian
context where formal agricultural skilling opportunities remain absent, Iyer and Rao (2024)
demonstrate how skills are acquired informally through participation in everyday agricultural
practices and intergenerational embodied learning. In agricultural households, the gendered
learning of tasks begins at an early age, and so does the gendered process of skill acquisition.
While young women (particularly those from higher caste backgrounds) tend to acquire
agricultural skills that can be performed within the domestic sphere, young men acquire
skills that entail more public performances and receive greater community-level recognition.
Moreover, men’s superior mobility allows them to develop more expansive social networks,
which increases their opportunities to learn skills from peers outside the family. Such gen-
dered pathways of skill acquisition also have implications in terms of representation and
perception. Women tended to see their work as just ‘helping out’ and as an extension of
their domestic responsibilities at home. As a result, women’s skills remained largely invisible,
unpaid, or poorly paid, and widely devalued despite making substantial contributions to
agricultural livelihoods and the rural economy (see also Ramamurthy 2010; Vera-Sanso 2012).
612 T. BROWN AND G. DE NEVE

Social processes of skill acquisition: formal, informal and non-formal

The push towards greater TVET provision in the global South generally assumes enhanced
provision of formal training. Yet, skills are rarely acquired exclusively in formal learning set-
tings. Research on ‘communities of practice’ attests to the importance of community-based,
situated learning for acquiring both skills and the social, motivational resources needed to
progress from novice to master (Lave and Wenger 1991). Moreover, much learning occurs
at work, with instruction from supervisors, guidance from peers, and mimesis of fellow work-
ers (Carswell and De Neve 2018; Fuller and Unwin 2003). It often involves self-directed learn-
ing rather than explicit training (Chea and Huijsmans 2018; Regel and Pilz 2019). Ethnographic
research has highlighted the richness of such skill acquisition processes, much of which
relies on non-verbal, sensory and embodied ways of learning (Grasseni 2010; Ingold 2018),
involves hands-on practice and performance (Cross 2012; Marchand 2008, 2010), is mediated
through apprenticeships (Chambers 2020; Gowlland 2012; Simpson 2006), embedded in
traditions of craftmanship (Sennett, 2009; Wilkinson-Weber & DeNicola, 2016), and central
to the (re)production of community, gender and personhood (Cross 2012; Kondo 1990;
Marchand 2008). As King (2012) suggests, across much of the global South, employers them-
selves prefer to provide informal on-the-job training rather than recruiting formally trained
workers, both because such training imparts firm-specific skills and because workers without
formally recognised and accredited skills have lower expectations regarding wages and work
conditions.
Several papers in this volume explore the spectrum of types of learning – formal, non­-
formal and informal2 – and provide novel insights into the ways these interact, diverge or
complement each other in particular settings. Şenay and Gür (2024), for example, examine
two different modalities of learning the ney (reed flute) in contemporary Turkey. The first
was a large-scale adult education programme run through a state-sponsored vocational
training institute. The second was a more traditional private centre of learning, marked by
master-apprentice relations. The authors show how the former was characterised by imper-
sonal relations between teacher and student and a rational approach to curriculum and
pedagogy, whereas in the latter, the apprentice received personal attention from the master
and developed meaningful bonds with them (Fuller and Unwin 2003). Şenay and Gür also
show that whereas formal learning was somewhat more aligned with cultivating skills as
marketable assets, the informal learning setting entailed more holistic ethical training and,
as one is enlisted in the unique style of one’s master, involves a sense of devotion and
belonging to a particular lineage. Cautious not to indulge in simplistic binaries, however,
Şenay and Gür also emphasise that, even in the public training institute with its large classes,
trainers were given substantial scope to innovate pedagogically and develop their own
styles, leading to substantial variation between different classrooms.
Other contributions – by Iyer and Rao (2024), and Carswell and De Neve (2024) – sug-
gest that despite sustained policy rhetoric around increasing the provisioning of formal
skills training, much skill acquisition in the global South remains informal and non-formal.
Carswell and De Neve (2024) show how, in Tamil Nadu’s garment sector, locally popular
and preferred pathways into the workforce did not involve formal training. Rather, their
informants reported upskilling themselves via informal means, particularly on-the-job
training, and through spatial mobility between firms and job roles. Their paper investi-
gates an underexplored area: the nature of informal, job-based pathways to skill
 Third World Quarterly 613

acquisition and its intersection with the political economy of labour markets, gender and
caste relations. Echoing Upadhya and RoyChowdhury’s (2024) findings from Bangalore’s
service sector, Carswell and De Neve (2024) found that formal training was more about
industry seeking to recruit workers from far-off rural areas than about imparting advanced
skills for more secure or better remunerated employment. Iyer and Rao’s (2024) study of
rural Karnataka similarly suggests that formal skill provisioning for agriculture was thin
on the ground and that also here skills were largely acquired in informal ways – in com-
munity and family settings – and through non-formal means, such as self-help groups
and agricultural extension services. In all these case studies, the modalities of skill acqui-
sition remained deeply implicated in the making of gendered persons, the reproduction
of (caste) inequalities and the recruitment of migrant workforces.
Other contributions in this volume suggest convergences and synergies between formal,
informal, and non-formal learning. Gil’s (2024) ethnography of a mobile phone repair training
centre in São Paolo, Brazil, shows how this popular and successful centre drew on pedagog-
ical styles of both street repair and high-end IT training – styles which attracted new actors
into mobile repair, while excluding others. Brown’s (2024) study of agricultural vocational
training in north India shows that in localities where opportunities for formal agricultural
learning existed, these often relied heavily on informal learning to complement them. This
was because formal training was often overly theoretical – with training institutions lacking
the pedagogical knowledge, administrative capacity and physical infrastructure to provide
effective practical classes. As such, most trainees continued to complement their formal
learning with informal practical experience. However, such informal learning opportunities
reproduced inequalities (as in Iyer and Rao 2024) as not all trainees had equal access to them.
Brown’s study suggests that older, more privileged, and better-connected men had the social
networks required to access informal communities of practice and enhance their learning.
Together, the papers emphasise the need to understand the complex imbrication of formal,
non-formal and informal modalities of skill acquisition, while recognising the role of the
latter in both producing meaning and identity, and reproducing inequalities.

The political economy of skills and skill development

Skills policies are often optimistic that the right kind of skill provisioning will have a trans-
formative effect on national or regional economies as well as on individual human well being
(Allais 2012). Such perspectives need to be tempered by an understanding of the political
economy of skill development, demand, and utilisation (see Brown 2022). The problem has
precise parallels with earlier policy efforts in the global North to transition towards ‘high
skill’ economies through TVET reform. Here too, critical commentators noted policymakers’
failure to pay attention to the political economy of particular industries, labour markets and
regions: the way in which they organise the labour process, their changing demand for
different types of skills, and the prevailing patterns of labour recruitment and remuneration
(Allais 2022; Lloyd and Payne 2002). Understanding this wider political economy context is
crucial to comprehend why workers across the global South – even after upskilling – often
continue to find their skills under-utilised, under-remunerated and undervalued, and why
decent employment and dignity at work do not automatically flow from skill development.
Social institutions operating at a local scale also shape processes of skill formation, often
in ways that reproduce social inequalities. These include the gendered division of labour in
614 T. BROWN AND G. DE NEVE

the household as well as community-level institutions such as hierarchies of caste and eth-
nicity. They entail a set of social practices, norms and values that structure labour markets
alongside shaping who engages with, and benefits from, skill development programmes.
Let’s consider gender. Wolf’s famous account of factory women in rural Java revealed how
women were pushed into low-paying, low-status jobs within manufacturing, not because
of a lack of skill but because managers preferred single, unmarried, and young women for
the stated reasons that they were easier to control and discipline, hard-working, cheaper
and less bound to engage in union activity (Wolf 1992: 116). This pattern is anything but
unique to Java. Studies from around the world have shown that women are routinely incor-
porated into labour markets in ways and for reasons that often have very little to do with
skill (Ngai 2005). Indeed, as Diane Elson reminded us a while ago, ‘labour markets are gen-
dered institutions’ (Elson 1999). They are the ‘bearers of gender’ in that they reflect the norms,
values and social expectations of society, while also using and reinforcing existing gendered
inequalities through modes of recruitment, skills training, payment and recognition.
Upadhya and RoyChowdhury’s (2024) contribution offers a critical perspective on the
role of government-sponsored skill training programmes in Bangalore’s urban economy.
Situating skills training within the city’s rapidly growing service economy, they discuss how
marginalised rural youth were recruited into short-term training courses that were presented
as a route to economic mobility but in fact landed trainees in low-end, insecure service jobs
with few career prospects in the city. Their study of four training centres found very little by
way of technical skills provisioning. Training was mostly oriented towards ‘soft skills,’ in which
trainees were moulded to the requirements of urban industry and to adopt subservient
dispositions. They emphasise that rather than developing skills, training centres performed
similar functions to labour contractors, delivering a compliant, flexible and well-adjusted
workforce to urban employers (Ruthven 2016, 2018; Nambiar 2013). Ironically, the jobs in
which trainees were placed were often entry-level positions that niether required advanced
skills nor offered further opportunities for skill development or career progression. As training
centres only received government payment on having placed a trainee in a job, their main
incentive became placing trainees in (any) jobs, rather than imparting skills and facilitating
access to better employment. The result was a disconnect between the goals of the skill
training centres and the aspirations and expectations of trainees, who ended up frequently
moving between jobs and places in search of better pay and conditions. At odds with the
Government of India’s skill development goals, training centres effectively contributed to
the creation of a peripatetic and precarious urban service workforce.
Carswell and De Neve’s (2024) contribution similarly focuses on the political economy of
the Tiruppur textile region of Tamil Nadu, South India, to trace the informal pathways through
which a rural workforce acquired garment skills. Rather than getting formal training, most rural
workers gained garment skills from employment and upskilled themselves on the job. However,
such informal learning processes were highly gendered. Acquiring advanced garment skills
was contingent on gaining experience across multiple firms and work processes, and moving
between companies to gain a diversity of skills and knowledges. In the South Indian context
– as across much of the global South – men were more likely to have the kind of socio-spatial
mobility required to access such skills than women, who as a result often ended up in home-
based production or jobs closer to home. Age and stage in the life course mattered, too. Even
skilled women garment workers typically left the workforce on getting married or having
children, only to return to the industry later in life usually in less well paid and less skilled roles
 Third World Quarterly 615

that they could combine with domestic responsibilities. The gendered political economy of
labour markets and households goes some way to explain why men tended to gain more skills
and get better jobs over time, while women experienced downward career trajectories despite
being skilled. Current supply- rather than demand-driven skills training initiatives, they con-
clude, fail to recognise localised gendered, caste-ised and racialised forms of exclusion that
continue to mark both skill acquisition and labour market opportunities.

Identity, aspirations and agency

Skills are not just economic assets. Several bodies of scholarship – including ‘communities of
practice’ theory – attest that the possession of skills and the process of becoming skilled are
also sources of esteem, personal and social identity, belonging, and purpose (Lave and
Wenger 1991). Most ‘situated learning’ not only takes place within ‘communities of practice’,
but also enhances a sense of belonging in such communities and of shared values (Lave
1993). Gowlland’s (2024) contribution demonstrates this rather directly. He highlights how,
for indigenous people in Taiwan, acquiring traditional skills such as woodworking was not
only an economic asset, but also provided a basis for learning about one’s community and
place in wider society. While learning woodworking skills from elders in their village, trainees
also developed stronger relationships with elders and learned about their collective history,
their myths, and their unique relationship to local materials. Skills also attuned practitioners
to more relational aspects of their identity vis-à-vis the colonial state and the market economy.
Kaba’s (2024) contribution on the transmission of skills in Firozabad’s glass bangle man-
ufacturing industry in north India similarly focuses on the role of skills in the making of a
trade identity. Kaba examines how the transmission of skills through master/apprentice
relations, everyday shopfloor conviviality and interactions in the mohallā (neighbourhood)
became central to the formation of a ‘community of practice,’ reaching beyond the bound-
aries of caste and religion, as well as to the rise of a shared trade consciousness and identity
around bangle making. While glass making skills were initially the prerogative of the
Sheeshgarh, a caste of Muslim craftsmen, and shaped by intersections of gender, caste and
religion, over time different forms of sociality and apprenticeship relations enabled the inclu-
sion of new communities into glass making and the rise of a wider trade identity. This identity
crystallised around a shared trade consciousness and enabled the reproduction of glass
making in a context of rapid industrialisation and a shift to factory-based production.
Moreover, combined with an emerging class-based identity around factory work, this trade
identity also fostered wider solidarities and collective action within the cluster, even though
suspicions about new communities infiltrating the trade did not fade completely.
Such questions of identity clearly reveal that skill acquisition is not just about gaining
technical competencies, but also about (re)shaping the dispositions, values, and socio-moral
outlook constitutive of one’s ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1984). This is particularly relevant in the
global South, where skill development policy and practice are increasingly promoting
so-called ‘soft skills’ – i.e. skills of language, communication and comportment. Driven in
part by industry demand, many training programmes have an explicit focus on ‘soft skills,’
and even where they do not, the training of comportment and personality development
has long been recognised as part of the ‘hidden curriculum’ (Jackson 1968). While there is
some evidence – particularly from the global North – that soft skills can improve one’s career
mobility (Vaughan 2017), critical studies suggest such benefits may be confined to elite
616 T. BROWN AND G. DE NEVE

industries. For less privileged workers – and especially those in feminised industries in the
global South – the emphasis on soft skills can often downplay and eclipse workers’ substantial
technical competencies (Grugulis and Vincent 2009).
This therefore begs the question of the ‘content’ of soft skills and what they can deliver
for trainees and their career prospects, rather than for industry (see Ruthven 2018). As dis-
cussed in this volume, there is reason to believe that ‘soft skills’ – and the broader focus on
personality development as an implicit or explicit component of training (Srivastava 2022) –
serve as a means to discipline workers and turn them into the compliant and subordinate
labour force that the growing service economy in particular requires. Scholarship has already
highlighted the deep ambivalence of soft skills training: on the one hand, it seeks to cultivate
enterprising subjects who behave according to neoliberal rationalities (Gooptu 2009, 2013;
Srivastava 2022), yet, on the other hand, it aims to create a pliable workforce, capable of
deferring to class-inflicted authority (Kikon and Karlsson 2020; Nambiar 2013). For some
trainees soft skills training might be experienced as alienating, in that it often demands a
pervasive and even quite unrealistic transformation of the self (Bardalai 2021; Maitra and
Maitra 2018). For others it might appear as a valued introduction to class-specific language,
comportment and communication styles, which trainees are bound to encounter in their
jobs and which their own schooling may not have prepared them for (Baas and Cayla 2020;
Fuller and Narasimhan 2006). Either way, the question remains as to what such training
consists of, how it is being received and responded to by trainees in different contexts, and
how it may advance or curtail their opportunities in the job market.
These questions are taken up by Ray (2024) in his study of a skills training centre in Pune,
west India, where youth aspiring to join entry-level jobs in domestic call centres, retail stores
and coffee-shops undergo intense and regimented training to become ‘professionals.’
Professionalism, Ray argues, is associated with the acquisition of soft skills pertaining to
identity management through which young men and women learn to regulate their bodies,
behaviour and language to fit into fast-paced urban ‘servicescapes’ oriented towards serving
a higher-class clientele (see also McGuire 2013). While the training comprised modules rang-
ing from time-management, dress, and corporeal attitudes and competences, to linguistic
and communication skills, the trainees did not just see these as an imposition on un/willing
subjects by neoliberal capital. Rather, as Ray’s empirical study of trainees’ responses to such
training reveals, trainees often valued such skills training as an exciting invitation to enhance
their self-confidence and explore new life-worlds. Yet, tellingly, they also adopted the
demands of professionalism selectively, against what they themselves considered to be
acceptable, appropriate, and/or practical, and they adapted it to the exigencies of their
localised lives, aspirations and cultural values.
This is also reflected in Datta’s (2024) contribution, which zooms in on a particular soft
skill – mastery of the English language – that is widely valued for the mark of social distinc-
tion it carries. Datta presents an ethnographic study of participants in an English-language
training programme in Delhi. The trainees, most of whom came from non-elite backgrounds
and did not attend English-medium schools, expressed aspirations to acquire these skills in
order to achieve social inclusion amongst English-speaking circles. Learning English as a
skill went hand-in-hand with acquiring familiarity with middle-class values, lifestyles and
dispositions. However, as these skills were taught, the curriculum also reinforced distinctions
between elite and non-elite within the Indian setting. The pedagogical styles of the training
centre – such as insisting on ‘English only’ both within the classroom and outside – also
 Third World Quarterly 617

tended to reinforce ideas of English as a superior language and made trainees ill-at-ease
within their everyday pluri-lingual environments. Teaching English as a ‘skill’ was part of
both the production of a desirable and well-versed labour force for industry, and of the
wider dynamics of language power, cultural capital aspiration for class mobility and ideas
of desirable personhood among young trainees. Datta’s study ultimately questions whether
the re-conceptualisation and teaching of English as a ‘skill’ democratises access to the lan-
guage or, conversely, engenders new registers of inequality.
This raises the broader question of how training alters trainee expectations. Skill acqui-
sition is innately future-oriented, since acquiring skills is always in anticipation of its future
application and the future rewards, status, and identities it may afford. The sorts of expec-
tations inculcated through training are therefore of considerable interest. Some research
from China suggests that vocational training has the effect of downgrading expectations
– encouraging those enrolled to believe they are ‘failures’ with respect to academic educa-
tion and that they can only expect a life of drudgery as part of an urban ‘underclass’ (Woronov
2016). Yet, elsewhere in the global South, the opposite seems to be the case, with training
programmes serving to boost (often unrealistic) expectations that certified skills will lead
to better employment and upward mobility (Nambiar 2013; Koo 2016; Cross 2009; Brown
2023). Datta’s (2024) study, for example, shows how everything from the design of class-
rooms to the ways trainers were encouraged to present themselves enhanced the expec-
tation that English language skills would lead to new forms of social inclusion and access
to the benefits of economic globalisation. In some cases, this over-inflation of expectations
reflects the efforts of for-profit training enterprises to drive up enrolments through the
presentation of appealing promises (Nambiar, 2013; Ruthven 2016, 2018). Upadhya and
RoyChowdhury’s (2024) contribution, for example, suggests that trainees are deliberately
deceived about their later job prospects in order to funnel them into recruitment channels
and deliver them as a cheap labour supply to the urban service sector industry. At the same
time, expectations are managed as trainees are told not to expect too much from their first
placement and that pay will only rise if they persevere, in order to prevent them from drop-
ping out from training or their first job placement prematurely.
Taken together, Ray, Datta, and Upadhya and RoyChowdhury’s contributions highlight the
many ambiguities of soft skills training – in terms of what it seeks to achieve for employers,
how it fits into trainees’ own aspirations and self-understanding, and whether it is ultimately
empowering or reproducing inequality and subordination. As Upadhya and RoyChowdhury’s
(2024) contribution reminds us, at the lower end of the service sector, ‘soft skills’ are less about
promoting entrepreneurship than servile dispositions. They often entail cultivating the virtues
of obedience and politeness, and teaching anger management and coping skills geared at
preparing novice migrants to the city to deal with demanding employers, ill-tempered cus-
tomers and general ‘migration shock’ (see also Gooptu 2013). Indeed, while raising aspirations,
(soft skills) training can also contribute to disappointment when expectations are subse-
quently not met in the labour market.

Conclusion
Such lines of critical inquiry suggest two ways forward for the skill development agenda.
First, there is a need to ask whether the stated aims of skill development policies are
618 T. BROWN AND G. DE NEVE

achievable, given prevailing social structures that limit opportunities to utilise skills in ways
that improve prospects for employment, livelihoods and dignity. Such a view aligns with
that of previous research and commentary, which cautions against positioning skill devel-
opment as a panacea to all manner of social and economic ills (Allais 2012; Wheelahan,
Moodie, and Doughney 2022). Second, it needs to be queried whether the aims might be
overly restrictive, with an excessive focus on a set of narrowly defined economic outcomes
as indicators of the ‘success’ of skill development programmes. The economistic, ‘human
capital’ assumptions that inform skill development policies across the global South often
prevent meaningful consideration of how the acquisition of skills may be sources of personal
empowerment, social integration, recognition and meaning-making (Powell and
McGrath 2019).
In both cases, a deeper understanding of the ‘social life of skills’ stands to enrich debates on
skills for development and to help re-conceptualising training initiatives from a demand – rather
than supply-driven perspective (or a bottom-up rather than top-down approach), that is more
in tune with the existing learning patterns, employment needs and wider aspirations of those
whose life prospects training aims to improve (Ramasamy and Pilz 2020). Such an approach to
skill development also requires a better understanding of the wider political economy context
in which skills and jobs are embedded, as well as of the social and cultural environments that
give shape to skills demands and employment needs.

Acknowledgements
This collection emerged from an online workshop in 2021 called ‘The Social Life of Skills,’ jointly hosted
by the University of Melbourne and the University of Sussex and supported by an Australian Research
Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (ARC DECRA) project titled ‘Agricultural Skill
Development in India: Assessing Acquisition and Impact’ (Project ID: DE180100901) and a University
of Melbourne DECRA Establishment Grant. We are grateful to all of those who participated in and
supported the workshop.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The research presented in this paper was partly sponsored by an Australian Research Council
Discovery Early Career Research Award (ARC DECRA) project titled ‘Agricultural Skill Development in
India: Assessing Acquisition and Impact’ (Project ID: DE180100901), as well as a University of
Melbourne DECRA Establishment Grant.

Notes on contributors
Trent Brown is Associate Professor at Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he convenes
the Sustainability and Society Research Group. He is also a research associate at Nelson Mandela
University, South Africa. He has published on contemporary social and political theory, while his
empirical research explores themes related to skill development, sustainable transitions and social
change in rural north India. He is the author of Farmers, Subalterns, and Activists: Social Politics of
Sustainable Agriculture in India (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-author (with John Harriss
 Third World Quarterly 619

and Craig Jeffrey) of India: Continuity and Change in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2020). His current
projects explore how social and institutional factors facilitate or inhibit remunerative, empowering,
or meaningful ways of developing and utilising skills in agricultural and craft communities.
Geert De Neve is Professor of Social Anthropology and South Asian studies at the University of Sussex.
He has carried out long-term field research in Tamil Nadu, South India, for over 25 years, and has pub-
lished extensively on the politics of labour in the Tamil Nadu garment industry. He has researched
changing relations of skill and employment, debt and unfreedom, and socio-economic inequality in the
era of neoliberalism in India. His recent interests include the politics of inclusion, social protection, digital
technology and citizenship in Tamil Nadu. He has published widely in peer reviewed journals, including
in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; Ethnography, Economy and Society; and Modern Asian
Studies. He is the author of The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy (Delhi:
Social Science Press/Oxford: Berghahn, 2005). With Rebecca Prentice, he co-edited Unmaking the Global
Sweatshop: The Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)
and, with Mao Mollona and Jonathan Parry, he co-edited Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological
Reader (LSE Monographs in Social Anthropology 78, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2009).

Notes
1. https://unevoc.unesco.org/home/fwd2UNEVOC+Publications
2. Within education literatures, ‘formal learning’ typically refers to that which occurs within formal
education institutions, leading to recognised qualifications. ‘Non-formal learning’ occurs in
other institutional settings (such as NGO-led training) and does not typically lead to institu-
tionally recognised qualifications. ‘Informal learning’ refers to that which takes place in more
socially embedded, non-institutional settings (within the family or workplace, for example).

ORCID
Trent Brown http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9895-3130
Geert De Neve http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8874-4749

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